Paul Hinz

Opinion is worthless

Tuesday Jul 25, 2006

Opinion is worthless - at least that's what I've discovered.

A surprising statement from me, in that I follow the ideal that the greatest good for the team, for the enterprise, for society is when decisions are made with input from low and high, when the community's input is sought and considered.  But there is a difference between input based on opinion and that which is verifiable fact.  Everywhere people are expressing opinions, about politics, art, products, ethics, sports, and even science. Increasingly the daily data we pour over in blogs, from analysts, from experts, from leaders, is filled with bias, contradictions and inaccuracies - expressed as opinions.

descWhy has this occurred?  A great while ago, the scientific method was formalized "Recognizing that personal and cultural beliefs influence both our perceptions and our interpretations of natural phenomena" [1] to help us minimize their impact when we create theories.  The scientific method helped to bring the advancements which now provide us radio communication, television, the internet, email, and blogs which are the channels from which we receive an increasingly large amount of opinion.  As a simple exercise, ask yourself how many of your opinions come from a set of definitive sources (e.g., a book) rather than from identifying with a group of individuals (the largest influence), from television, from blogs, etc.   As the volume of contributors to the "ether" has increased, so too has the increase of opinion and a lack of personal adherence to stating or finding fact.

Examples of opinion are everywhere, just look at today's "Documentaries", e.g.,  "Super Size Me",  which shows an individual who eats nothing but McDonald's for a month.  The case seems to have an observation (people who are fat eat at McDonald's), a hypothesis (eating at McDonald's will make you unhealthy), an experiment (eating nothing but McDonald's for one month) and a result (the individual was unhealthy after 1 month).  But there was no control subject (what about if this same person ate nothing but mom-and-pop hamburgers for a month or what about a set of 100 individuals doing the same test), there was no variable isolation (what about the fact the individual did no physical exercise during same month, or the effect of 3 extra large colas per day,  what about a different person, etc.) and no confirmation of the results, (can anyone repeat the results, where they fake in order to sell the video, would the video sell if the results had not been conclusive?).    It would be amusing except that an enormous number of elementary schools now show this film in science class.   More examples: Drinking Red Wine reduces risk of coronary heart disease, (sponsored by the Red Wine Industry),  analyst reviews of .NET vs Java, speculation on sporting team or individuals prowess, or books, movies, actors, politicians, the world even.  Our participation age is increasing the volume of information, and if one of our largest errors for opinion comes from identification with a specific group, isn't access to more data valuable? Does the volume of data help to find truth and reduce opinion biased by group identification - or allow access to more factual data to help counter localized opinion?

Today opinions are considered valuable, that volume of data is a good goal, that through increased participation, one can find fact and truth and justice and equality.   We can often hear the justification for an opinion (especially one relating to ethics) that "Galileo was persecuted for his 'beliefs' ", therefore if my opinion runs contrary to ethics, it must be valuable.  But Galileo was expressing facts not beliefs.  Those who persecuted him were the ones with strongly held opinions.  Regarless of the volume of opinions, the number of people providing input, if the data provides opinions they provide no value.  We have reversed the Galilean persecution.   Instead of fact being met with distrust due to opinions, we now have opinions driven as fact just because someone believes them. Opinions by their nature do not facilitate learning, and thus cannot be used to build one upon another to form a hypothesis.  Just because Bob is convinced the Patriots will win the SuperBowl and Dan believes the Chargers have the best offense in the league, and Mary believes the 49er's have the best quarterback, I cannot conclude any outcomes from any games.  More opinion is not valuable.  [Interesting to note is that those who most feel they are "scientific" are increasingly more "opinionated"  - feeling that smart makes right.  Galileo wasn't as much persecuted because of his rebellion against religious dogma as rebelling against conventional opinion, which in our scientific institutions, occurs again and again due to weighted opions due to non-religions factors such as authority, ethics, group identification, etc. ]

descIn "Essays", Michel de Montaigne, philosophizes or more apropos given our blogging community, discusses everything in his daily life in order that we can evaluate the mundane.  He chronicles everything including his daily bowel movements for goodness sake, but in doing so, is he really trying to tell us that from a preponderance of data we can learn something?  No, instead he is telling us that our cultural biases cause our opinions and that one must leverage methods to go beyond what you think you understand.   A glut of the mundane can be valuable if created with a purpose, for Montaigne, he was trying to understand what makes us happy.  It is not the volume of data that is important, but the method and purpose by which the information is evaluated and presented.

What to do: So today we have blogs (and other channels) to present our water cooler data.  How do we reduce opinion, how do we increase fact?  How do we contribute value to the 'ethernet' and improve the lot of Man? 

  1. understand your opinions
  2. understand your biases
  3. learn the rules for argumentation (and the great  Fallacies)
  4. research
  5. expect to learn (and to be wrong)
  6. listen and understand
  7. as soon as you understand, re-evaluate
Opinion's purpose is conflict, but fact requires hard work. So, when you speak, when you write, observe if you express opinion or fact.  Research, evaluate, quantify, contribute, participate; look for errors, expect errors; have no pride in just being right.   If you don't believe that, well, that's your opinion.

Paul Hinz //

[4] Comments
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Posted at 10:30PM Jul 25, 2006 by ripcurl in Personal
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Comments:

Excellent argument, but I disagree with what appears to be your underlying premise about scientific "fact." It would more properly be called "scientific consensus." Most things on the cutting edge of science are theory for a long time before they become well-accepted fact, and even the most indisputable "facts" are actually theory backed by evidence. As our ability to observe the world improves, some "facts" fall by the wayside. So what we consider scientific "facts" are not immutable, as can easily be seen in the modern refinements to Newton's "Laws of Motion."

With passing centuries and many advances in technology, we have a great deal of convincing evidence that Galileo was right, so much so that few people would dispute his "facts" anymore. But calling his work "fact," with the benefit of hindsight, gives an inaccurate picture. At the time he lived, he had only a new theory, with some evidence he had gathered which suggested that it "matched reality," (i.e. had better predictive value) than the old theory. But with limited, (and oerhaps esoteric?) evidence to support his theory, gaining acceptance for it was no slam dunk. The difficulty that today's scientists often face in challenging the orthodoxy of their own colleagues is not very different, suggesting that the Church should not be considered "unique" in this regard. (Although scientists don't tend to threaten each other with torture, "excommunication" happens and is career-limiting. The story of Freud is worth exploring, for example.) Even so, the barrier to entry is probably a good thing, because there is appreciable value in the stability of the scientific canon, and many exciting theories have been "disproven" as coming from faulty evidence.

While some "facts," like Galileo's, are in essence a scientific consensus around a theory backed by observation, other "facts" are pure convention. Your sidebar example about insects falls in this latter category. Adult insects have six legs because that is the (man-made) DEFINITION of an insect: in their adult form they have tripartate bodies, exoskeletons and six legs, among other characteristics. There is no *predictive* theory here; instead there is an imposed classification system which calls an animal an insect only if it has the correct set of characteristics. (And of course this leads to the occasional problem of an animal that does not properly classify, like the duck-billed platypus.)

The inclusion of "worm" in the example is perhaps misleading, because most of what we think of as "worms" are not insects. I think what is meant is more like "caterpillar," although I grant that the immature insect from which silk is harvested is called a "silkworm" rather than a "silk caterpillar."

Posted by Rich on July 31, 2006 at 11:28 AM PDT #

I wrote about it here.

Posted by M. Mortazavi on July 31, 2006 at 05:47 PM PDT #

Excellent thread... I'll have to think about this. Will let you know when I have something sensible to say (or rather, posit) ;^)

Posted by Robin Wilton on August 03, 2006 at 04:00 AM PDT #

Incidentally, Rich has a point; I have recently had the opportunity to look at dragonfly larvae and caterpillars, and they do actually have what can be identified as legs.

In the case of the caterpillar it's interesting because what it uses for locomotion are (more than 6) stubby little sucker-type thingies, to use the scientific term, whereas in front of those it has three pairs of short but recognisably leg-like limbs. Oddly, these are not always in contact with the ground.

Posted by Robin Wilton on August 03, 2006 at 04:06 AM PDT #

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